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Sunday, August 19, 2012

Luisa Capetillo: Art/Agitation/Anarchy!

Luisa Capetillo: Art/Agitation/Anarchy!

“When there is no longer the need to steal a
roll of bread, for lack of food; when private property no longer
exists and we all begin to view each other as brothers and sisters, then
and only then will the prisons and useless, destructive churches
disappear. Misery, hate and prostitution will cease to exist. Free
trade will exist because all frontiers and borders will be abolished
and then true liberty will reign on this planet” – Luisa Capetillo"I believe nothing to be impossible; nor do i
absorb myself in any particular moment or new discovery. For that
reason I find no idea to be utopian. The essential thing is to put each
idea into practice. To Begin!" - Luisa Capetillo"The institution of slavery no longer exists, but as long as there are masters, there will be slaves" - Luisa Capetillo

Luisa
Capetillo was an anarchist, working-class labor activist, and women’s
rights advocate living and working in the midst of the rapid
industrialization of Puerto Rico during its transition from Spanish rule
to u.s. control after the Spanish-American war.
She was born out of wedlock in Arecibo, Puerto Rico on October 28,
1879 and was home schooled by her parents and dedicated one of the
books that she would later write, to her mother “who never imposed or
forced me to think according to tradition.” She also declared that

The majority of my studies I have carried out in relation to myself

Luisa herself would go on to have two children of her own outside of marriage as a matter of principle, believing that

Marriage as currently practiced is an error. In our current
society, women get married only to follow custom…. I think that a man
should…choose the woman he loves with all of his soul, and make her his
wife, and create a family. And if they are not compatible and feel
obligated to separate, then they can each choose again in the future

Luisa eventually, adopted an anarchist philosophy/politic and it was
those ideas/ideals that she would live by for the rest of her life.
Luisa was baptized as a Catholic, but rejected the concept of
religion. But unlike other anarchists, Luisa considered herself to be a
“good Christian”, who simply rejected the rigid dogmas and rituals of
religion and believed that the Catholic Church was allied with the
ruling class. She insisted instead that true Christianity was to be
found in the eradication of oppression and exploitation.
Early on, Luisa embroidered shirts and handkerchiefs in order to
help support her family, but eventually secured a position as a
lectora/reader in one of Arecibo’s tobacco factories. The reader would
entertain/educate the workers by reading to them from local and
international newspapers, books on socialist/anarchist philosophy, and
also from novels chosen by the workers themselves, while the workers
would select/cut/coil tobacco leaves to produce cigars.
Often, certain passages of particular literary works or political
essays would be repeated several times so that workers could commit
them to memory. It was also tradition in the tobacco factories to have
open discussions/debate on particular lectures without interrupting the
work. Workers also debated/voted on which works would be read each day
and it became common for the lectors to read anarchist literature
aloud in the tobacco factories, thereby greatly aiding in the
dissemination of anarchist ideas amongst the workers. It was in the
tobacco factory that Capetillo had her first contact with the union -
La Federación de Torcedores de Tabaco (The Federation of Tobacco
Rollers) which was affiliated with La Federación Libre de Trabajadores
(The Free Federation of Labor).
The first union in PR, La Federación Regional de Trabajadores (The
Regional Federation of Workers), was formed during the military
occupation of Puerto Rico by the u.s. in 1898. The eight-hour workday
was ordered by military decree in 1899, and the prohibition against
unions imposed under Spanish rule was abolished. However, because of
ideological differences, a group of members broke away and formed the
FLT - Federación Libre de Trabajadores (the Free Federation of Workers)
that subsequently affiliated with the American Federation of Labor.
Like other leaders of the FLT, Luisa associated the Puerto Rican
independence movement of the time with Puerto Rico’s local elites.
During the first half of the 20th century, u.s. sugar plantations
swallowed up many acres of land formerly belonging to Puerto Rican
small farmers. In addition to displacing the small farmers, the new u.s.
corporate controllers of the farming industry in Puerto Rico built
huge grinding mills where they used new, sophisticated machinery to
cultivate, harvest, and process the sugar and began hiring fewer and
fewer Puerto Rican workers to do the work in Puerto Rico. As Kelvin
Santiago-Valles points out in his book, “Subject People” and Colonial
Discourse

Undernourishment and, to some degree, famine, were very
much present in the daily lives of most of the Island's population
throughout the first half of this century

Between
1900 and 1901, u.s.-owned corporations recruited over 5,000 Puerto
Rican men, women and children to work on sugar plantations in the then
u.s. territory, Hawaii, and others were shipped to Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, Ecuador and Mexico.
A New York Times article from 1901 mentioned

inspection of the Porto Rican immigrants brought here by
the steamer Colon shows that they are in such state from the need of
food that they must be held at the quarantine station and fed until
they regain strength sufficient to enable them to bear the journey to
the other island and to the plantations on which they work.

While characterized as the remedy for Puerto Rico’s economic woes,
this low wage work was the equivalent of modern day slavery, so many
Puerto Ricans would escape during the long ship to train to ship trip to
Hawaii, while others who were not so lucky ended up working in the
iron mines in Cuba. As one Puerto Rican mine worker declared

In
Santiago, Cuba, Puerto Ricans cannot stand up under the duress working
the iron mines, owned by an American company. The promises made have
not been met and, as a result, many of our brothers have been forced to
beg for charity

Beginning in 1890s, and in the months preceding the u.s. invasion of
Puerto Rico, attacks carried out by “extremely impoverished peasants”
who came to be known as Los Tiznados, for the soot that they would
camouflage their faces with, broke out all over the island. Peasants,
sometimes numbering up to 200 people, burned haciendas and warehouses
and stole property. Large landowners and their families were vilified
and killed, while the impoverished Puerto Rican insurgents distributed
the appropriated properties among themselves.
One member of the propertied class, Dr Manuel F. Rossy who was a
lawyer, local political leader and editor of the local newspaper, wrote
that there had been municipalities where

As many as twenty-two estates had been destroyed, and in many cases the coffee crop had been ruined

By the second half of 1900, urban insurgencies carried out by Puerto
Rican peasants had become a daily occurrence. In the mountainous town
of Cayey, a mob of laborers storm the jails to liberate other
previously arrested members of their group, and in several towns the
Mayors were stoned and shot at.
But the movement was soon weakened by a wave of captures and arrest.
Between 1899 and 1905, the rate of arrest in Puerto Rico, per 100,000
inhabitants, more than quadrupled as many poor Puerto Ricans began to
find alternate means of economic survival and were quickly
“criminalized.” During this period there were also riots that broke out
between u.s. soldiers and Puerto Rican civilians, who were mostly poor
laborers.
Capetillo’s involvement in the unions began in 1905 during a farm
workers’ strike led by the FLT. Because of her previous collaborations
with radical and union newspapers in Arecibo, she was able to write
propaganda and organize workers in the strike. She played a prominent
role in the strike, and she quickly became a leader in the union. As
Kelvin A Santiago-Valles points out in "Subject People" and Colonial
Discourses, the strikes in Puerto Rico

were particularly notorious for the significant degree of
militant resistance on the part of the striking laborers during 1905
and 1906

Santiago-Valles also mentions that at least twenty-three strikes
took place at this time, "twenty-two of them involving cigar makers."
In 1906, Police and 1,500 strikebreakers recruited to suppress a strike
in Arecibo

clashed with strikers, leaving one worker dead, several
injured, and 113 strikers arrested… an all-time high ensued in the
absolute number of arrests for disorderly conduct, mayhem, riot, and
fighting registered by the police

During this time, Luisa made her living from selling the union
newspaper as she traveled throughout Puerto Rico, educating and
organizing workers. Her message was simple - workers must unite under
one banner in order to defend their rights for dignity and equality.
She was such an effective organizer that her hometown of Arecibo became
the most unionized area in the country.
In 1908, she urged the FLT, at their convention, to adopt a policy
to fight for women’s suffrage and challenged union members to support
women’s rights, stating that

Woman, as an important factor in human civilization, is worthy to obtain complete liberty

Departing from the elite suffragists, who recommended the vote for
literate women, only Luisa insisted that all women, not just the rich
or literate, should have the same right to vote as men.
In 1909, the FLT embarked on an ambitious organizing campaign, which
they called “la Cruzada del Ideal” (Crusade of the Ideal). Under the
auspices of the FLT, Capetillo, along with rank and file workers and
union leaders, traveled on foot, by horseback and by train across
Puerto Rico to organize and educate workers. During this crusade,
Capetillo wrote for the union newspaper, Union Obrera, and published
her own periodical entitled La Mujer. She also wrote and published a
collection of essays entitled Ensayos Libertarios (Liberation Essays)
where she depicted the organization of workers as the first step toward
a new and more just and egalitarian society based on worker
cooperatives.
Luisa also wrote and published Mi opinión sobre las libertades,
derechos y deberes de la mujer (My opinion about the liberties, rights
and responsibilities of women) which is the first feminist thesis
written in Puerto Rico. Although she considered herself a feminist, she
did not join any of the feminist organizations that emerged during
that time. She instead dedicated all her efforts to the labor movement,
believing that the union was the vehicle for poor, working women to
obtain justice and equality. She also wore pants and other “men’s”
clothing in public, challenging the social mores of the time and she
advocated for free and liberal education for all men and women. One of
her most controversial ideas at the time was “free love.” In one of her
essays she explains that women should choose whom they will love
freely, without legal interference or matrimony and that there should
be no intrusion or state control on peoples personal lives. Capetillo
asserted that sexuality was political, indeed central to a
revolutionary agenda and stated clearly

I say that love should be absolutely free, for the woman as
well as for the man, and add that love cannot really exist except
under conditions of freedom. Without complete freedom, love is
prostituted

In 1912, Luisa traveled to New York City where she established ties
with the Cuban and Puerto Rican tobacco workers in NYC, and she also
wrote for various radical/anarchist papers while there. A year later
she moved to Tampa, Florida where she worked as a reader in one of the
tobacco factories. During her stay, she published the second edition of
Mi Opinión.The
next stop in her travels was Cuba where she joined the sugar cane
workers in their strike that was organized by la Federación Anarquista
(the Anarchist Federation of Cuba). She circulated a manifesto which
advocated violence and was ordered to leave the country and was later
arrested for “causing a public disturbance” by wearing “men’s clothes”
in public. She challenged the court, arguing that there was no such law
that prohibited her from wearing men’s clothing and won the case by
arguing in Court that “no law prevented her from wearing men’s garb,
and that such clothing was appropriate for the changing role of women
in society, and that she had worn similar clothing in the streets of
Puerto Rico and Mexico without state intervention.” Capetillo saw her
“right” to wear pants without state intervention as “symbolic of a
larger struggle against state and patriarchal control” in the lives of
women.
By 1913, many craft trades registered rising levels of unemployment
notably the dock workers at 62 percent, carpenters at 56 percent and
cigar makers at 23 percent; while unemployment levels among agricultural
laborers in Puerto Rico as a whole, reached 47 percent.
Luisa returned to Puerto Rico where she organized and participated
in several strikes, including the Sugar Cane Strike of 1916 where over
40,000 workers in 32 municipalities participated, which resulted in an
average salary increase of 13%. That same year, forty thousand laborers
Paralyzed most of the plantations on the island for nearly six months
and appointed Governor of Puerto Rico, Arthur Yager wrote a scathing
letter to President Woodrow Wilson stating that

The so-called labor leaders and agitators of the strike in
Arecibo were in reality political leaders of a recently organized
socialist party playing a game for political control of the
municipality

Luisa led three major strikes during this time, and in the course of
her work was arrested, clubbed by Police and beaten by hired
strikebreakers and thugs.
During the next few years, Luisa traveled back and forth between New
York City and Puerto Rico, attempting to establish a pan-Caribbean
system of schools for the children of agricultural workers, but she
failed to find any support for this initiative among union leaders in
either the US or PR. While in New York, Luisa established a boarding
house and cafe where workers/revolutionaries could conduct anarchist
meetings while eating vegetarian meals. She also made a trip to the
Dominican Republic in support of striking workers in 1919 and wrote
several plays that incorporated her radical politic and a “newspaper
for working women.”
By embodying the revolution in her daily life, Luisa Capetillo was
instrumental in revolutionizing the role of women in Puerto Rican
society and “became a paradigm for the new women” as well as the
embodiment of resistance to the state and it’s “illegal authority” over
anyone.
In one of her writings, Luisa indicated that within “nature” and its
own “natural laws” (wo)man kind could find its way away from
war/oppression/injustice and the dis-harmony that seems to perpetually
exists in “modern” society

Nature indicates to us the true path toward goodness, but
we want to be wiser than nature, and herein lies the origin of all our
errors, in wanting to modify the natural laws, which is where beauty,
health, harmony, and truth are to be found

In 1920, Luisa returned to Puerto Rico, settling in a working-class
neighborhood in Rio Piedras, but by 1921, she began suffering from
tuberculosis, and died on October 10, 1922. She is buried in the
Municipal Cemetery of Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
- N4P

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